Nick Sheron starts most days by strolling across his six-hectare farm with his two golden retrievers, Daphne and Phoebe, surveying the sheep that graze the land between autumn and early spring. From time to time, he yanks trapped ones from gaps in his fences. “They’re very good at getting their heads stuck in things,” he laughs.

Sheron, a liver physician, left a full-time academic role at the University of Southampton, UK, in 2019 when he and his wife Lisa bought a sixteenth-century longhouse in Devon’s Otter Valley — 150 kilometres west of his former workplace. They now grow apples and onions, brew their own beer, harvest honey from “fierce British black bees” (Apis mellifera mellifera), and rewild their meadows with yellow-rattle plants (Rhinanthus minor), which sap nutrients from grass and allow rare wild flowers to flourish. Sheron also has a chicken called Rowena, “who likes human company and follows me around all day”.

Careers advice from scientists in industry

In between brewing beer and building a pizza oven from the farm’s clay, Sheron continues to work as an adviser on alcohol policy to the UK Department of Health and as a visiting professor at both King’s College London and the University of Plymouth, UK, studying the link between cheap alcohol and the continuing increase in liver-disease mortality.

“We haven’t regretted the move at all,” Sheron says. On the contrary, “it’s absolutely fantastic” now his days are no longer spent staring at a screen, he says. As well as his visiting professorships, he expends his passion for science on growing, winnowing and selling in-demand yellow-rattle seed for others to buy and use to rewild their own green spaces.

Sheron is just one of many scientists who quit academia to reinvent themselves. Some opt for ‘science adjacent’ roles, while others embark on a completely different career path, often applying many of the skills that they acquired as working scientists. Many feel liberated from the stresses of academia’s ‘publish or perish’ culture, and say that they feel freed from the tedium of delivering the same lectures year after year.

People start their own businesses or non-profit organizations; travel to do independent research or conservation work; and mentor others in their fields, hoping that they will have a greater impact on the world this way. Although taking the leap and leaving academia might be daunting, many say that they feel satisfied and have continued to learn as they pursue their passions in the wider world.

Turning science into business

Not everyone leaves science of their own accord. Immunologist Luz Cumba Garcia was an adviser for sustainability to the US Department of State, supporting global-health efforts for HIV and AIDS through the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR). PEPFAR, which Cumba Garcia describes as “the most successful global health diplomacy programme in the world”, once supported 55 countries across Asia, Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean. Her role at PEPFAR was to help low- and middle-income countries develop sustainable health policies and strengthen health systems, thereby reducing dependency on the United States. Before that, she had led work on global health cooperation between the United States and Mexico, including coordination on transboundary health threats, such as highly pathogenic avian influenza.

But in January 2025, after the 2024 re-election of Donald Trump as US president, Cumba Garcia was placed on furlough from the state department. “It was a very cruel, very painful process,” she says, preceded by e-mails requesting that she and her colleagues justify their experience and accomplishments, to “prove we were worthy”. She was let go permanently in April 2025.

But she didn’t let the setback slow her down. “I enjoy giving workshops and training to scientists on how they can communicate with policymakers, and vice versa,” she says. “It was something I always did as a side hustle, so I said ‘what about doing this full time?’”

How to sail smoothly from academia to industry

She turned her passion into a business, founding her one-person company, SciPolicy Global Strategies, in July 2025. Her consulting work includes advising clients in the private sector and non-profit organizations on topics such as global health, biomedical research and the ethical use of artificial intelligence in scientific research. She also gives talks in both English and Spanish on how science can help policymaking, and leads interactive workshops and coaching on social-media management and personal branding for scientists.

It’s not all plain sailing, Cumba Garcia notes. “Some days are better than others,” she admits. “A good and productive day is one filled with networking, meetings or securing new consulting contracts or speaking engagements, work I truly enjoy,” she says. “A not-so-good day is when things take longer to materialize, such as delays in contracts or challenges in finding the right opportunities.”

“At the same time, I think that this a great time to reinvent yourself, not under the ideal circumstances because the funding is lacking. But it’s also the time to be bold, to be brave, to embrace your passions.”

Passion drove Erika Jefferson to found Black Women in Science and Engineering (BWISE) when she was laid off in 2015 from her job as a supply-chain optimization manager with Praxair, an industrial gas company, after a fall in oil prices. BWISE provides career-development and mentoring support to under-represented women in middle management and senior leadership roles, as well as early-career scientists, who have science, mathematics or engineering degrees. A chemical engineer by training, Jefferson had spent much of her career working for oil companies, including Chevron and Amoco.

“I had already had the inklings of BWISE, so it was actually a blessing to leave and to really think ‘what could this be?’,” she says, recalling her moment of inspiration. “I went to a conference in 2015, and I was sitting in a row of other Black women. Everybody was an engineer. I started asking them, ‘How do you like your job?’ The answers ranged from, ‘I hate my job,’ to ‘I hate my job even more,’ to ‘I hate my job most of anyone in here.’”

The women spoke of long hours dealing with breakdowns at chemical plants, but also of pervasive racism, “with maybe some sexism thrown in”, says Jefferson. “I thought, ‘Maybe we should get together and share insights.’” She started organizing networking events and coffee socials in her home city of Houston, Texas. “But I soon realized that some people are really struggling and that they need more than just a pat on the back. They need coaching, counselling and mentoring.”

“In the beginning, I created something that didn’t exist for Black women,” says Jefferson, who is BWISE’s president.

Before the COVID-19 pandemic, BWISE had expanded into multiple chapters in a number of US cities. It now has members around the world. “We’ve had career fairs, we’ve done informational sessions, we’ve had networking in-person events, we’ve had brunches, dinners, breakfasts — you name it, we’ve had it all over the country. So many folks have met each other and connected through BWISE,” she says.

When scientists get laid off, “you want to pivot into something meaningful with the next phase of your life”, Jefferson advises. “I always ask people for one word to describe me, and they always say, ‘a connector’. I love connecting people, and my biggest pride is that the work that I started to help women has also now helped the coming generation of scientists.”

Love for her career motivated Cláudia Santos to continue her fieldwork even when funding wasn’t forthcoming. In 2023, after completing her PhD at the University of Lisbon on the impact of climate change on human migration in Guinea-Bissau, she applied for a three-year contract with the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology. After waiting a year for a response, her application was rejected. The foundation merged with another to create the Agency for Research and Innovation (AI²) on 1 January.

Self-funded science

Santos decided to pursue her own self-funded research in Guinea-Bissau on how people stay in their communities in the face of climate change, motivated by networks and solidarity, or because of spiritual attachment to their homes. “I wanted to continue to publish and write, because I really struggled to detach myself from Guinea-Bissau,” she says. While doing fieldwork with these communities, she made friends and learnt “very important communal values, the sense of caring when you have so little; it eventually puts everything in your life into perspective”.

In 2025, Santos co-founded Upstand, a social-enterprise company that is devoted to disaster-risk reduction, with climate change specialist Andreia Sousa. The two met through the University of Lisbon’s PhD programme in climate change and sustainable development policies. Upstand, Santos explains, “is a social-impact agency specializing in participatory research, facilitation and community-led design” supporting inclusive initiatives “across climate-change adaptation, human mobility, ocean biodiversity and disaster risk”.

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